Modem computer networks often involve systems/agents/servers that are required to maintain (have) a large database of information (Items). For example, yahoo.com provides news, stock market quotes, sports information, multimedia content etc involving a multitude of large databases. The databases are used to serve requests for subsets of items of information from various client systems (Information seekers/Seekers).
The most obvious manner of fulfilling the requests is by sending the requested subsets of items to each individual client. This approach however may burden the computational resources of the server as well as the network resources. Alternatively, the server could broadcast all items to all information seekers and the individual recipients would then extract the information required by it. This solution results in inefficient utilization of the network bandwidth while at the same time burdening each recipient with the task of searching through an enormous amount of information. One manner of resolving the contradicting requirements on computational costs at the server as well as at the client system is to group items that are requested by groups of clients and then furnish the set of responses to the corresponding groups of clients. In this manner, a tradeoff between the contradicting requirements can be achieved that optimizes a global objective.
There are various types of costs involved in servicing the requests from clients. The server will incur some cost each time it sends an information bundle across to the clients.
A given client may not receive exact number of items that it has requested; it may receive more/less number of items than that the requested number. There is a cost associated with each item that a client did not receive. Also, there is a cost associated with each item it received and did not request for, because the client has an additional burden to prune such extra information.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,805,823 provides a system and method for optimal multiplexed message aggregation between client applications in a client-server network. This invention provides for a message architecture that multiplexes messages to a client. This invention does a plain simple aggregation of messages and not of clients. Further the aggregation done is plain and simple and no optimisation technique is defined in order to save on computational resources.
US patent Publication Ser. No. 2002020124101A1 relates to server side optimization of content delivery to clients by selective in-advance delivery to enable performance optimization based on the current load of the server. This invention based on probabilistic measure delivers the content in advance to the clients. It does not take into consideration the actual requests by one or more clients.
US patent Publication Ser. No. 20010027494A1 bundles one or more messages destined for the same address or sub-address. The data packets are managed only for the same client and the computing devices being served by it. The bundling is done based on the user-defined time limit or the packet size. The invention does not disclose any method wherein an optimisation between bundling the messages as against transmitting them alone is achieved.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,407,994 provides a system and method for bundling messages for transmission in a telecommunications network. This patent bundles one or more messages intended only for a particular client and does not take into consideration other clients having the requests for the same information item. Thereby though this patent reduces the bandwidth requirement, it does nothing to tackle the processing overhead involved at the server or at the client end.